


How the Lothcat Changed His Spots

by WinterSwallow



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars Rebels
Genre: Echo Base, Hoth, Post rebels, Vaguey vagueness on the subject of certain jedi, characterisation marches on regardless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-06 02:26:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,219
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11026662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinterSwallow/pseuds/WinterSwallow
Summary: Luke goes in search of information about Dagobah and happens across some ghosts.





	How the Lothcat Changed His Spots

Luke spent his third day on a bunk in an alcove in the medical bay, being fussed over by an officious medical droid, who took his temperature every quarter hour and would have liked nothing better than to stick him back in the bacta tank for another cycle.

Visitors – Han, Leia, Artoo, Han again – filtered in and out to keep him company and to surreptitiously count his fingers and toes. They were pink again, his toes. They had lost that dusky-bluish sheen that the doctor had told him meant they were preparing to drop off. And there were still ten of them.

None of his visitors stayed too long. There was work to be done. Around Echo Base there was always work. Leia spent most of her time closeted with the Alliance brass and Han and Chewie were fixing up the Falcon. She’d grown temperamental in the cold weather, Han told him over lunch; moaning and spitting and flaring her afterburners when she didn’t need to, being a real ungrateful guarring moalhapper. And hey, just because she was the… just because she was the fastest ship in the fleet didn’t mean she could go around treating a guy like he was dirt.

When Luke had grinned at that, Han had threatened to send Threepeeo to be his nursemaid.

In the in between times, when he was alone in his bunk, Luke looked at the stars. The Alliance had amazing star maps, vast, beautiful and more detailed than anything Luke had ever had access to growing up. They had been gifted secretly by Mandalorian baronies, or taken from the archives of Alderan. Some had even been smuggled from the Great Libraries of the Old Republic, by a tiny, fierce librarian who guarded them like a scatarbeast guards her cubs and whose name only Chewie could pronounce.

But none of the star maps held what he was looking for.

_Dagobah. Yoda._

Ben’s system; the place he had told him he must find. It was nowhere on any of the maps.

He dared not mention it to anyone else, either. Han would just clock him over the head if he thought he was thinking about ‘another damn mumbo-jumbo quest’ and the others would look at him as if he were crazy or – as seemed more and more common these days – as if he were something to fear.

Looking back, it might have been a hallucination anyway, some addled fever dream of a mind on verge of freezing death.

Except –

He was certain he had heard that name before, seen those stars.

_Dagobah._

When he was a little boy, one of his toys had been a silver and glass draydl. When the draydl was spun, it would fill the air with a field of stars. Stars with great, dangerous names like _Mustafar_ , _Tython_ and _Aach-To_. Aside from his name, that draydl had been all he’d ever had from his mother. He would sit for hours watching those  stars, getting Aunt Beru to spin the draydl for him.

But even if Dagobah had been a part of that star map, going back to Tattooine was impossible now. Vader’s cronies would be waiting. And even if he were to go, the draydl would not be there. When he was 13 the news had come that an Imperial Inspectorate was conducting searches of farms in the area. Uncle Owen had taken the draydl into the yard and smashed it into powder, ground the powder into the sand.

So, all Luke could do was keep looking.

By the end of the day he was seeing star fields even behind closed eyelids, but was no closer to locating Ben’s quest. It was a relief when Wedge came through the door, carrying two dinner trays and he could switch to thinking and talking about the grubby realities of Rogue Squadron over curried chou-shou.

With Luke laid up, Wedge was putting the new potential pilots through their paces. Lotch, he said, was a choke, and Perot a grumblemuncher. Sca-Ho, he thought, was an utter skepfurnon from top to bottom, but he would make a pilot.

The evening bell chimed and Hachatekay came to check Luke’s vitals again, cluck over him and try to herd him into bed. Wedge broke his bread roll in two, stuffed the remainder in his mouth and swung his feet down off the bed.

“Better get back to it. I promised Jannson time in the sim. Bring you some real work tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Wedge.”

And because it was Wedge and he wasn’t going to ask questions or make clucking noises or go running to tell Leia he asked, “Hey, Wedge, you ever heard of the Dagobah system?”

“Dagobah?” Wedge twisted his thumbs in that way of his that showed he was thinking. “Nope. Is that a core planet?”

“Rim I think. Definitely rim. It’s not on any of the star charts.”

Wedge shrugged. “You know, half these backrim dustpits go by a dozen different names. Probably called something different on the charts.”

Luke shook his head. He had looked at what felt like every planet in charted space now. None of the planets he had studied _felt_ right. “I don’t think so. Could it have been hidden? Removed from the charts?”

Even Wedge raised an eyebrow at that. “Above my pay grade, pal.” He tapped his chin. “But if it’s secrets you’re after, you could try the old lothcat.”

“The who?”

“Got a den down in Sub-basement Two. Sector A.” Wedge scratches the back of his head. “Knows a thing or two about altering maps. Just don’t let him steer you into any volcanoes.”

Of course, by the time Luke had been freed from sickbay, the Empire had arrived and the base was under aerial bombardment. He had stuffed himself into his flight suit, wished Hachate luck and headed for the lower levels.

To save power in the cold, only two of the A wings were kept active at a time. The deck crew would need to spend 16 precious minutes bringing the rest of Rogue Squadron online. Luke had signed off on this decision as a necessary evil. So had Wedge. This wasn’t stopping him bellowing at the deck chief, “ _14 minutes? Whatdaya mean 14 podunking minutes? In 14 podunking minutes the empire could have a second podunking Death Star built and ready to fire. Johsson, don’t think I can’t see you over there. Throw up on your own time.”_

Confident now that his friend had things in order and that he had a few precious moments to spare, Luke threw himself into an elevator and jabbed the button for Sub-Basement Two.

The base was already on full evacuation order. But in contrast to the chaos up above, Sub-Basement Two was empty and almost silent, save for the _drip, drip_ of water from the roof above a space heater. They were deep in the permafrost here.

He wondered if he was already too late, if the lothcat, whoever he was, had already evacuated.

But then he heard a sound. A rhythmic banging, that sounded more like construction than weapons discharge.

He trotted along the passage, past rooms that were mainly unused crew-quarters and storage spaces, to the door right at the end of the corridor. This was sealed and on it was painted, in bold strokes, a spotted ginger cat, its back arched and its face scrunched in a look of comic feline aggrievement.

From behind the door there came another bang and then the sound of someone swearing.

Luke pushed open the door.

Inside, a soldier – big as Chewie and nearly as hairy – was ripping apart a computer servo with his bare hands and dumping its innards onto a handcart. He had brindled purple fur and huge, round green eyes. He certainly looked pretty feline, though Luke knew better than to say so.

“She says,” he growled to someone unseen, “That turning your comm off in the middle of a mass evacuation is a good way to get left on this ice cube.”

“Tell the general,” came the clipped reply, from behind another large servo bank, “That my dear mother died 19 years ago on Coruscant and that I am not in search of another.”

“Did you get that?” The soldier asked his comm and listened for a response. “Uh-huh…Huh. Yeah, I’ll tell him." He clipped the comm to his belt. "She says in that case to remind you who’s up there and that it’s never too late to be fitted for your Imperial necktie.”

“Noted.”

An ancient astromech droid plugged into the central console, whistled something to him and the big cat laughed. “That’s true. Didn’t you used to share office space with –?”

“Yes, yes. Just hurry and get that thing dismantled,” came the irritated reply from behind the servo.

The soldier rolled his eyes, then picked up what remained of the servo in an enormous wookiehug and dumped it on the trolley. The trolley sagged and its hover piles dimmed under the strain of the weight, but it stayed aloft. “Awright. Got it. What next?”

Luke took this as his cue and cleared his throat. “Hi.”

The purple cat’s ears flicked back and forth. He glanced around, made a contemptuous _chuk_ sound at the back of his throat and went back to tearing out servos.

Beside him, the astromech whistled something obscene.

Luke tried to remember that he was a Jedi, hero of the rebellion and a commander to boot. He tried again. “I’m Luke Skywalker…um Commander Skywalker, of Rogue Squadron.”

“Bully for you.” One, two, three, circuit boards were yanked out of their sheaths. “Got somewhere to be right now then, don’cha?”

Luke chose to ignore this. “I’m looking for the lothcat. Is that you?”

“Ah. No. That would be me.” A man’s fair head poked out from behind the bank of servos and just as quickly disappeared. “Just one moment, commander.”

Moments they did not have. Yet he was forced to stand by twiddling his thumbs as he was pointedly ignored by the soldier as he slunk back and forth, shifting hardware around.

After half a minute the big soldier stopped what he was doing and peered into the grainy vid screen lodged on the desk. He snarled something in a language Luke didn’t know. A word that sounded like _Caravan_ or perhaps _Cabinmast._ “They’re launching walkers.”

Luke felt his stomach drop. He had only seen AT-ATs from far away and even then they had been terrifying. He had never had to engage one in combat.

“Of course they are,” The lothcat, however, seemed less than impressed. “That’s SOP for a ground based assault. But at their current speed they won’t reach the shield generator for 45 minutes. Longer if we can slow them down. Just count yourself lucky it’s _The Executor_ and whatever misfortunate whelp they’ve promoted this week up there, instead of someone truly dangerous.”

“Yeah, we’re so lucky,” snapped his companion. “I can’t believe my luck really.”

He paced back and forth, pulling at a couple of datadisks and seemed unsettled. “We should be out there, helping.”

“Oh yes.” His companion sounded preoccupied. There came a crackle as something electronic fizzled out. “Excellent idea. Get out there and die like a real rebel. Shall I get Rex back here? You two can go out and try to harpoon a few walkers in the snow storm.”

Luke had heard of Captain Rex. Han sometimes played cards to win moonshine from the old soldier’s sill. There were rumours that he had fought in the Clone Wars, that he had known Luke’s father, but he had been sent off-world on a recon mission just after the Falcon had arrived at Echo Base so Luke still hadn’t had any chance to sit and talk to him.

The cat cracked a sudden, savage smile. “Nah, that only works on really _stupid_ imperials.”

Just then, the lothcat emerged from behind the servo bank. He was a tall, stocky human, bulked up further by the grey winter coat he had on. The coat hid any insignia of rank he might be wearing. The bantha fur collar brought out the flecks of silver in his dark blonde hair and beard. He nodded to Luke; a terse, precise movement that gave no hint about what the power differential might be, and dumped his own clutch of circuitry into the overloaded trolley.

“Take this up, will you?” he asked his companion. “And bring back the package.”

“Right-o,” The soldier programmed co-ordinates into the trolley and it trundled off towards the elevator. Then he hefted a ten-gallon data sink onto his shoulder and made for the door.

Smacking into Luke as he brushed past him must have been deliberate. He was three hundred pounds of lean muscle and Luke was left breathless as the ripples of pain ran down his tender shoulder where they collided.

“Watch it, kid.” He glared down at him as if the impact was all Luke's fault.  Luke took a step back, his hand inching his way to his belt.

“Oi,” The lothcat jabbed the soldier in the ribs, seeming to know just the chink in the layers of body armour to let him inflict the most pain.

The big cat flinched. “Hey. What the -”

“Don’t be maudlin,” came the curt reply. “The payload. Chopper and I can finish up here.”

“Right.” Grumbling, kicking his big feet in front of him, the big cat left.

The lothcat watched him go with a shake of his head, then turned to Luke. “Forgive my friend,” said the lothcat. “Grief makes him… erratic. And irritable.”

“I’ve never seen anything like him,” said Luke.

“He’s a lasat. There are few enough left in occupied space. But what can I do for you, Commander? You’ll forgive me if I keep working. We’re short on time.” He turned around and went back to pulling apart the central data console. His droid murmured at him.

“No, everything you can’t salvage, destroy,” he told.

It whistled again.

“What did it say?” Luke’s binary had improved in leaps and bounds lately but he still couldn’t quite believe his ears.

The lothcat glanced back, distracted. “Oh. He said, ‘Isn’t he a little short for a Jedi knight?’” He knelt and started stripping caulk off the central panelling. “He has a unique sense of humour. What do you want, Commander?”

“Oh, I…” It was hard to know where to begin.

“I need a question, Commander.” The man’s manner brooked no dawdling, even as he efficiently pulled strips of sealant from the console.

“Oh. I’m looking for Dagobah.” It sounded mad now. Force-drunk, Han would call it. Uncle Owen would have called it something shorter. But in for a credit... “Wedge-said-you-might-know-how-to-find-Dagobah.”

“Behind you.”

Luke stared at him, wondered if this was some sort of Jedi test.

“Turn around,” said the man.

Luke turned. Sitting on a shelf by the door was a circular data disk, the sort that might fit into a nav computer.

“The co-ordinates to Dagobah are in there.” Strips of caulk came down one by one. “It should sync with the nav of your x-wing. But only yours.”

Luke stuttered in place for a moment, stunned. Then he reached out with his mind, with his feelings, searching for that space, the anabaric charge that had surrounded Ben, that sometimes seemed to spark out of Leia. Or worse, for the black void that had been Vader. But he found only the faintest glimmer in the man, the same sort that bloomed from most living beings. This man was no stronger in the force than any of the other rebels he had met.

“How did you know? Are you– ” He didn’t know what it was he was about to ask. This man was no Jedi. And he could not have served in the Clone Wars. He must have been younger than Luke when Ben had come Tattooine.

“The information originated with a predecessor of mine. She left the planet’s location in the care of the rebellion. That and other… secret information.” The man glanced around and something about his expression caused the hairs on the back of Luke’s neck to stand on end. “The fulcrum turns.”

“You knew _Fulcrum_?” Even back on Tatooine Luke had heard the name Fulcrum. The vets up at Tosche Station would breathe that name, though nobody would ever tell him what it meant. Han said that the stories of Fulcrum were cockamamie, that he was a boogieman made up to scare imperials and inspire greenhorns like Luke. Han was probably right. To hear it told, Fulcrum had fought on both sides of the clone wars, fought Darth Vader to a standstill, tricked the greatest admirals in the imperial fleet into giving away their secrets, single-handedly stolen the death star plans and could turn into a giant wolf made out of lightning. 

The man gave him a wry glance and went back to stripping caulk. “Something like that.” Beneath the caulk there were layers of screws. He glowered at them as if his glare might melt the steel. “I don’t suppose you could…”

When Luke blanked him, he pulled out his multitool and begin to unscrew the panel. “The information was passed though the line of her successors and eventually, as the current head of her network, to me.  Rest assured it is known to no one else living.”

“And now you’re giving it to _me?”_

“Her instructions were explicit.”

“And her instructions were to give them to me?” He could hear his voice rising in disbelief.

“When you asked. Yes.”

_“Who are you?”_

The man ignored him. He stood and  kicked down the remainder of the panel.  He made quick, efficient work; no wasted movements. The rebels didn’t train in close quarters combat, preferring to focus on marksmanship. CQC training was something only imperials…

Oh.

This time his hand went as far as his saber.

The droid twittered a warning.

“He’s not going to lop my arm off...” The lothcat replied patiently as he reached in and pulled the core out of the servo so that the whole panel went dark. “He can see I’m using it.”

Luke gazed around, stretched out every sense he had, in case he’d stumbled onto another trap. His communicator was on his belt, too. If he grabbed that instead of his saber was he giving up precious seconds?

“You’re an imperial!”

“Yes. It’s more common than you think. I was ISB.”

Sometimes, even on Tattooine, people would be taken by the Imperial Security Bureau. They would not return. Finding this man here, in the basement of Echo base, was a bit like meeting a droid that claimed it used to be a hutt.

Luke’s hand didn’t move off his saber.

“No,” the man didn’t seem to be the least bit perturbed by this. He was talking to his droid in an irritated manner. “No, I don’t need her help... No, see to your work... No, I’m not going to get the ‘jedi shave and haircut’... What do you mean ’improvement’?”

“There’s a difference between being a defector and being an agent of the ISB.” Luke had the feeling he was in danger of being forgotten. "The ISB are spies."

“Considerable differences. ISB special agents are considerably more useful than green academy recruits for one. And though the empire wants to kill all rebels as a matter of course, in the case of ISB agents the vendetta is a little more personal. I’m not a threat, lad. I left the Empire a long time ago and I’ve done them considerable harm since. Not even your head would save me from a cruel and imaginative death now. Chopper will vouch for me.”

The droid whistled that something to the effect that yes, if it were on a sinking ship and had to throw crew overboard to save itself, the lothcat would at least not be the first human it tossed overboard.

“Coming from him, that’s rather high praise. Forgive me, Commander, but don’t you have somewhere to be?”

Time was ticking down, but somehow Luke couldn’t let this go. “But… You weren’t captured or coerced? You didn’t – ”

“Skip ahead of Lord Vader in line at the cantina or accidentally step on his cloak? Perish the thought. No, I was an ordinary defector.” He glances pointedly at the monitor. “Those walkers are getting closer.”

“But why?” He knew how foolish he sounded, a petulant child.

“Ah. Moral debate at the worst possible moment. The Jedi way.” The man’s grin was sardonic. “Chopper, if you’re done, get clear.”

The droid bleeped and unplugged and the lothcat fed a data spike to the apparatus. It began to slowly insert itself into the machine.  

“How old were you when you rebelled?”

“Thirty-six? Thirty-seven?” Luke couldn’t even imagine living to be that old. “There was no sudden awakening. It was… a spectrum. I was fortunate in my choice of enemies and even more fortunate in my choice of friends. I’m not the first to slouch towards the light. I hope I won’t be the last.”

“Why did you defect?”

The man’s face darkened, and Luke felt the surge of suppressed emotions under tight control. “It’s different for everyone, and it’s personal. Buy me a drink some time, or save my life and maybe I’ll tell you.”

“Are you glad? That you joined the rebellion.”

“Glad? I’ve lost allies, friends - more than I can count. I’ve watched better men than me suffer and die for a hopeless cause, seen more horror than I thought the universe could contain, and stooped to acts I didn’t think that I would ever countenance. I’ve sent more rebel soldiers to their deaths as a rebel spymaster than I ever did as an Imperial Agent.”

He turned away so Luke couldn't see his face, but he could still feel those emotions spike and churn. “Still, consider the alternative.”

_“What the hell are you doing?”_

Luke turned and jumped suddenly to attention.

Standing in the doorway was a living legend. Even Han, who was never over-awed by anything, had let out a long low whistle when he had seen her first.

“Don’t be crude,” Leia had barked.

“Crude?” he had snapped back. “Me? That’s the dame that flew the Ibaar blockade. Show some damn respect.”

Luke had been introduced to the general once before, the morning after his Death Star run. With his gold medal still hanging around his neck he had shuffled up to her in the company of General Dodanna to be introduced. “General, this is Commander Luke Sky – ”

She had nodded, looked right through him and muttered something about having an evacuation to plan before stalking away.

Luke had got the impression she didn’t like him very much.

He was getting that same impression now.

She gave him a look so cold it would have killed a bantha, and then she turned on the lothcat. “What the hell do you think you are doing?”

“I told you not to call her,” the lothcat told the droid, prickly.

The general ignored him.  “I have a transport to escort. I should have been off this snowball six minutes ago and instead I’m saving your ass once again.” She threw him a bandoleer of thermal detonators.

He caught it out of the air. “Just finishing up.” He glanced down at his data spike, which had almost disappeared.

The General glanced around at Luke, “Commander, your squadron needs you. Now.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” There seemed nothing more to say.

He could hear them bickering as he left the room.  “I thought you were deleting everything.”

“I did. First I deleted everything, then I inserted a virus into the system with the capacity to cripple a star destroyer should anyone try to reconnect to it, and now I’m going to blow that system up.”

“Well, that’s not excessively paranoid.”

“I’m a _spymaster_ , excessively paranoid is a state that happens to other people.”

The big brindled soldier was waiting at the elevator, keeping the door open. He had an enormous rifle slung over his shoulder. “Are they wrapping up?”

“Yes.”

The lasat scratched his head. “Sorry, about before. Old wounds, yaknow? I’ve been fighting too long.” He gave Luke another punch on the shoulder. This one was friendly, though it hurt no less. “If you ever need anything, kid, come to me.” Then he shouted down the corridor. “Are you two coming or what? Some of us want to dent a few bucket heads before we die of old age.”

Moments later cart, droid, general and lothcat came pelting down the corridor.

“Karabast!”

“Move, Zeb!”

The six of them squeezed inside the elevator and the door slammed shut.

Luke felt the explosion as a muffled shudder.

A moment later the doors whirred open onto the main deck and he spilled out into the hangar, propelled by a butt at knee level from the astromech. It was still chaos and one of the deckhands was manhandling him towards his A wing. “Commander, she’s all fired up, your gunner is already aboard. Once you’re in we’re ready to launch.”

Luke stopped suddenly and turned, But the lothcat and his crew had already disappeared back into the crowd.   

"May the force be with you." It didn't seem to hurt to say it anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies: Necessary vagueness on the reasons why Kanan and Ezra have been removed from the holo-chess board


End file.
